Avoiding timing anomalies using code transformations

“This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." “Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.”Divide-and-conquer approaches to worst-case execution-time analysis (WCET analysis) pose a safety risk when applied to code for complex modern processors: Interferences between the hardware acceleration mechanisms of these processors lead to timing anomalies, i.e., a local timing change causes an either larger or inverse change of the global timing. This phenomenon may result in dangerous WCET underestimation. This paper presents intermediate results of our work on strategies for eliminating timing anomalies. These strategies are purely based on the modification of software, i.e., they do not require any changes to hardware. In an effort to eliminate the timing anomalies originating from the processor's out-of-order instruction pipeline, we explored different methods of inserting instructions in the program code that render the dynamic instruction scheduler inoperative. We explain how the proposed strategies remove the timing anomalies caused by the pipeline. In the absence of working solutions for timing analysis for these complex processors, we chose portable metrics from compiler construction to assess the properties of our algorithms